Adapting to Lockdown

How the team at CodeBlue have been adapting our camps to continue online, providing debate coaching despite the Covid-19 Pandemic.

The summer of 2020 was meant to be CodeBlue’s biggest year. In addition to our Bermuda and London camps, we’d planned to launch camps in China and Ireland as well as work on a series of new training courses. I’d deferred my legal training contract in order to do so and we couldn’t wait to bring our camps to new students. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always work the way you’ve planned it. By March, like millions of people across the globe, we found ourselves desperately trying to predict how the summer was going to play out, and by May we’d accepted that our in person camps would have to be paused until 2021.

However, what lockdown has really taught us is that while life doesn’t always turn out how you’d planned, it’s possible to find exciting upsides to even very difficult situations. Both Kenza and I coach at schools in London and have been amazed at the adaptability of our students to online learning when given the chance. It was this that inspired us to follow their lead and adapt our camp to this changing climate.

The most exciting thing about this project for me, was realising that while an online camp may not have the excitement of meeting students in person, it provided new opportunities for our students to be taught by the best of the best. In any physical camp, especially one that is international in nature, you can only bring a limited number of coaches. But by running the camp online, we were able to ask more mentors to join us, and so expose our students to an even broader range of coaching styles and experience.

In addition, Kenza and I have both gained a huge amount from the international aspect of debating, getting to meet many of our best friends through international competitions and training. Given this, we are incredibly excited to be able to open our online camp to students from across the world, meaning that everyone who attends will get to hear from people in different countries and hopefully gain even more from the experience.

So, while I wish I was currently in Bermuda as planned, running the second CodeBlue WSBC on the island (and enjoying the beautiful beaches on the weekend as pictured!), I am also excited to expand in this new direction. Just as lockdown has already taught us so much about what’s important, I hope that it also enables Kenza and I to grow CodeBlue in a way that makes it an even more exciting experience for every student who takes part.